Sophia Ortiz-Heaney

I was a part of an economic research lab for Professor Buzard. I took a class called “Economic research in Practice” with Dr. Buzard my sophomore year, which allowed us to get connected for this lab. I worked remotely, but we used GitHub and Zoom as our main sources of contact. I had a variety of tasks: Some literature review, some scanning through archives to find specific reports, documenting those locations, digitizing those files into a data set, and soft-coding a couple of figures on R. Throughout all of it, there was a lot of documentation to do and stay on top of. I enjoyed learning how to code the most, as it was the one area I was the least experienced in, but I also enjoyed looking conducting the literature review and seeing what parts of other papers are relevant to ours and what this could mean to strengthen or round out the paper.

I was not expecting there to be so much documentation to do. I like to do the physical work, but documenting every single thing Idid was pretty foreign to me before this experience. I now understand how important documenting your research process is, for call backs, reproducibility, grant funding reporting, and more.

I believe this experience allowed me to work with both quantitative and qualitative areas of research, especially learning how coding and system files work, as technical skills like coding were something I was lacking on. I think this experience is rounding out my original areas of weakeness like documentation and coding, and I’ll learning to work with them despite them, instead of avoiding them in general. This will all allow me to pursue my academic areas of interest, like strategic resources trade policies, green energy trade policies, and more.

I hope to work on this team for this semester, as well as pursue my own small qualitative project looking into strategic resources and infrastructure financial flows from Latin America and/or Africa. Receiving this award allowed me to get paid for the hours I spent doing research work.